"Excavations," the title of Kim Johansson's first show at her new Oakland gallery, works on a lot of levels. As the eight artists in the show dug through the physical (earth, water) and their own personal histories to put together their pieces, so did the curator, who founded the Johansson Projects as an outgrowth of an earthworks show she was putting together for another Oakland gallery. While Johansson didn't literally break ground to establish her new space, it will deepen the burgeoning downtown art scene, which hosts a monthly Art Murmur on the first Friday of every month.

"I've been working downtown on Geary Street in those galleries and doing some curating on the side," she says, referring to her work in San Francisco's art center near Union Square, "and I was curating a show for Ego Park (in Oakland), and it was getting bigger and bigger, and we noticed that the empty space was coming open on the corner, and I thought it'd be great to use the space for the show.

"So I decided to quit my job and take it on. I signed a long lease and went about taking my curating projects there."

Johansson wanted to mix up emerging and established artists in this show. Her hope is to blend the contributors into a "magical mix" that will introduce new work to each fan base. "There's so many great names in the Bay Area who are underrated," she says. "I really wanted to show that. A lot of the younger artists aren't really aware of who they are."

To that end, she's brought together two well-known environmental artists, John Roloff and Lewis deSoto, who agreed to do a gallery version of a concept they've submitted to the Oakland Estuary project. "One of the projects that interested me was that they wanted to show stratigraphic history of the channel walls so you can see a reflecting text of the history of the channel," she says. "They're doing a piece for me with reflecting text and water tanks."

"She (Britton) does these incredible works with paper," Johansson says. "Her father was a truck driver, and in memory of him she wanted to put his truck routes onto maps. She works very large -- she's done 10 feet by 10 feet collages of map and paper."

Johansson credits the frisson of the Oakland art scene for the breadth and depth of her inaugural show. She had originally wanted only four artists, but once she started talking about her ideas for the show, artists started "gathering around."

"That's what happens in Oakland," she says, "there's a collaborative effort."